In his last years in London Wilde’s behavior can only be described as reckless. It was as if he were asking to be caught, and eventually he was caught. Yet he had begun his travels happily, visiting France for the first time as a student, then spending his honeymoon in Paris. In frequent trips to the French capital he met well-known writers, feeling at ease with them, preparing a theatrical career with Sarah Bernhardt  then at the height of her fame.

Now the pace of Herbert Lottman’s book slows, allowing the reader to follow Wilde’s disgrace: his indifference to indictment, his careless attitude toward witnesses who turn against him, as if he did not face a mandatory sentence of two years of hard labor. Then self-exile to France, rejection by literary society, inability to write, poverty and deadly disease...

The author, who has spent over half his life in France, is best known for biographies of Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Colette, Jules Verne, Man Ray, and the Michelin brothers.

New Yorker by birth, Herbert Lottman first went to France as a Fulbright scholar (at the time he recognized Albert Camus sitting at a sidewalk cafe, the Flore at Saint Germain-des-Près, but was too shy to approach him). Returning to France to settle there, Lottman ran the European office of an American publisher, con­trib­ut­ing articles and reviews to American pe­riod­icals including Harper's, Saturday Review, the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review. Later, he joined the staff of Publishers Weekly, the Amer­ic­an book trade journal, as international correspondent.

In a second career Lottman wrote this first and still the definitive biography of Albert Camus, as well as biographies of other famous (but famously undoc­u­mented) French figures ranging from Flaubert and Colette to Philippe Pétain and the Roth­schilds. He is also the author of The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War and The Fall of Paris: June 1940.

The French Cultural Ministry re­cently promoted Herbert Lottman to the rank of Officer in the National Order of Arts and Letters.